Dr. Steven Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and has taught at Stanford and MIT. He is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. He s won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his 9 books including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. His 10th and best-selling book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, was published in February 2018. He s an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of the Times' 100 Most Influential people in the world today. He writes frequently for the New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. And as you can imagine, he has some pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as: why men and women aren t all evil, and why we all harbor some unsavory motives like revenge and revenge. But there are more things that go right, and there's a radical, inflammatory hypothesis that turns out to be a better way of learning about the world than what goes wrong. And so much of what you get from the world that goes wrong, because there's no right, because it's just not right. In this episode of The Jordan Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with the Harvard Family Family Professor, and talks about it all the time, and tries to make sense of the world as he sees it. Hope you enjoy it, and it's very nice, by the way, and thanks very much for making the time. Thank you so much for being a good human being. -J.B. Peterson and Mikayla Peterson - The Jordan B Peterson Podcast - Season 2 Episode 20: Progress Despite Everything (featuring: Dr. Steven P. Pipper, The Good, the Bad, the Good, The Bad, and the Evil, the Ugly, the Great, the Things That Go Wrong, and Everything That Goes Wrong, by J.B.'s Conversation with Steven Pippin, PhD by Dr. Steve Pinker
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:57.420Welcome to Season 2, Episode 20 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:03.480I'm Mikayla Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.
00:01:06.500Weekly update, Mom is still stable, and we are still stressed out.
00:01:10.380She's finally going home from the hospital next week.
00:01:12.900That's about it for updates, to be honest.
00:01:14.980Actually, I just tried Wagyu beef for the first time.
00:01:18.360Not that that's an important update, but if you haven't tried A5 Wagyu, try it.
00:01:23.320It's literally the best thing I've ever eaten. It was like eating chocolate. I almost cried.
00:01:28.780Sorry, that's not an important update, but I was still excited about it. I've only been eating meat for so long.
00:01:33.940Anyway, this week's episode, titled Progress Despite Everything, features Dr. Steven Pinker.
00:01:41.700Steven Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
00:01:46.060Dad's going to introduce him right away, so I won't give anything more away.
00:01:49.680Hope you enjoy it. Dr. Steven Pinker is a very interesting human being.
00:01:54.440When we return, Dad's conversation with Dr. Steven Pinker.
00:02:08.360I'm very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Steven Pinker from Harvard University.
00:02:15.400He's the John Stone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology there, and has taught additionally at Stanford and MIT.
00:02:25.200He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations.
00:02:33.260Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard.
00:02:39.020He's won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style.
00:02:53.320He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy's world top 100 public intellectuals and Times' 100 most influential people in the world today.
00:03:14.020He's chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications.
00:03:25.280Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, was his 10th and best-selling book, published in February 2018.
00:03:35.920And it's very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again, and thanks very much for making the time.
00:03:43.560So, can I ask you, it's been about a year since we talked last, and I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all, personally, what's this year been like for you?
00:03:53.680You've become a much more controversial figure, I would say, than would really be predicted.
00:04:00.520Like, you've always seemed to me to be a solid, reliable, interesting, mainstream scientist, not someone who would attract a tremendous amount of critical attention, and yet you've become, well, oddly enough, associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be.
00:04:23.540And so much of what you're doing is controversial, and so what's that been like, and what's your life been like over the last while?
00:04:31.320Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defense of reason, science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary, and I'm hardly a flamethrower.
00:04:39.300And as you note, I have put forward some pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as that men and women aren't indistinguishable, that we all harbor some unsavory motives like revenge and dominance.
00:04:54.080But saying that the world has gotten better turns out to be a radical, inflammatory hypothesis.
00:05:02.560There's, first of all, just sheer incredulity, because the view of the world that you get from journalism is so different from the view of the world that you get from data, because journalism reports everything that goes wrong.
00:05:13.660It doesn't report things that go right, and so if there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it.
00:05:21.420On top of that, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the world has never been worse than it is now, and data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs, and so that does attract some opposition.
00:05:39.340People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism, traditional liberalism.
00:05:48.140And so it does get some people exercised.
00:05:53.040Basically, anyone, if you're a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about the current society, then you're kind of committed to the idea that things have gotten worse.
00:06:06.080And the idea that things are not as bad as they used to be, not as bad as they could be, is an insult to that, those core beliefs.
00:06:15.040Yeah, well, it's a surprising thing, because, well, so let's talk about that a little bit.
00:06:21.140I mean, here's some of the things I know, I think I know, and maybe you could describe some of the things you know.
00:06:29.240And, like, I started learning that the world had been improving when I worked for a UN committee about five years ago now, and started looking at the data on ecology and sustainable economic development.
00:06:43.800And that's, like, there's some bad ecological news.
00:06:46.720I think that what we're doing to the oceans is fundamentally unforgivable and foolish beyond belief.
00:06:54.020But there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity.
00:07:00.220Like, there was a paper published in Nature not so long ago, stating, for example, that an area twice the size of the U.S. has greened in the last 15 years.
00:07:11.200I think it was the last 15 or 20 years, and that actually happened to be as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide, because plants can keep their pores closed if there's more carbon dioxide, and so they can live in more semi-arid areas.
00:07:26.600And there's more forests in the Northern Hemisphere than there were 100 years ago, and more forests in India and China than there were 30 years ago.
00:07:35.440And then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living.
00:07:41.200And the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952, which is a statistic that I just regard as absolutely miraculous.
00:07:53.860The African economies are growing, sub-Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment, if the stats are reliable, than economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically
00:08:08.160and have access to reasonable information into something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives.
00:08:16.080The rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate, right?
00:08:25.180We have poverty, considering it at $1.90 a day between 2000 and 2012, and I've read criticisms of that, saying, well, that was an arbitrary number.
00:08:35.620But if you look at $3.80 a day, you see the same decline.
00:08:42.040If you look at $7.60 a day, you see the same decline, not as precipitous.
00:08:46.360And even the UN, not known, I would say, for its optimistic prognostications, estimates that at this rate, by the year 2030,
00:08:56.520there won't be anyone in the world who's living below the current poverty level.
00:09:01.280So there are some positive statistics.
00:09:05.080So what would you like to add to that?
00:09:54.800We really can improve the world if we set our minds to do it.
00:09:59.120It should arouse so much anger, partly because people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better that they confuse it with certain kinds of magical thinking,
00:10:11.900such as that this must mean that there is a force in the universe that carries us ever upward, that just makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality.
00:10:24.200The universe not only doesn't care about us, but has a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us, like entropy, like pathogens.
00:10:36.840Entropy is the root of all human suffering, ultimately.
00:10:41.880I've read two other things that are peculiar, that are so interesting.
00:10:47.620Well, okay, so first of all, it's pretty hard on the Marxists, I would say, because even though there is inequality, and inequality is a problem,
00:10:58.740first of all, it doesn't look like inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism.
00:11:03.600It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem than that.
00:11:08.100Second, it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality.
00:11:14.060And third, and this is hard on the environmentalists, I think, is that it turns out that if you get people's income up to about $5,000 a year in terms of gross domestic product,
00:11:25.120they actually start to care about the environment, which I suppose is because they're not worried about dying instantly that day or that week.
00:11:34.180And so, we seem to be in this perverse situation for a pessimist where we could make people wealthy and in a positive manner,
00:11:46.720and we could make the world a better place simultaneously.
00:11:51.060And that does seem to be very hard on ideologues whose ideology is predicated on a fundamental pessimism.
00:12:00.040Or you get the other people, like the biologists do this sometimes, and say, well, yeah, we're purchasing all this short-term prosperity for these billions of people,
00:12:10.520but at the cost of some medium to long-term eventual precipitous apocalyptic collapse.
00:12:17.740And it's very difficult to formulate an argument against that kind of idea because, well, you never know when some...
00:12:25.180I think this is one of the things Taleb takes you to task for, doesn't he?
00:12:30.280Yes, even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of tail risks, both in the better angels of our nature and in enlightenment now.
00:12:39.200And indeed, we cannot take incremental improvement as itself an indication that the risk of catastrophes is at an acceptable level, and it may not.
00:12:52.640It's very hard to estimate what the risk of a catastrophe is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously.
00:12:58.260On the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resisted by people in the green movement.
00:13:06.000But if anything, it should give hope and sucker to the environmental movement, because it shows that it is not true that we have to choose between economic growth,
00:13:16.560which people do not want to give up, and protecting the environment, that we can have both.
00:13:21.420And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together.
00:13:23.700The nations that have done the most to clean up their environment in the last 10 years are the wealthiest nations, because they can afford it.
00:13:31.460If you're dirt poor, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head.
00:13:37.300And the fate of the white rhinoceros is going to be pretty low on your list of priorities.
00:13:42.300And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity.
00:13:45.700It's really awful to do without electricity.
00:13:47.260And I know having visited cities like Mumbai, which are horribly polluted, and they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity.
00:13:56.920But on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, then you're willing to spring for the cleaner energy, and you can afford the cleaner energy.
00:14:03.860And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy, and more long-term future concerns loom larger in your value system.
00:14:14.420So it's an odd assumption that both the hard right and the hard green have in common, which is that if we want to protect the environment, we have to sacrifice prosperity, go back to a simpler, more peasant style of life.
00:14:30.580The hard greens say, well, we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land.
00:14:38.320The hard right says, well, I don't want to do that.
00:14:43.320The reality is that if both policy and technology are deployed intelligently, as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and foregoing all of the benefits of modernity.
00:15:35.520The fact that it happens, this is one of the great fallacies in people's understanding of progress.
00:15:39.960That they equate the existence of progress with progress happening all by itself as if it was some force of the universe, which is contrary to reality.
00:15:49.900The other, you mentioned that the existence of human progress is a blow to doctrinaire Marxists, which is certainly true because we have seen the spectacular economic growth of India and China when they liberalized their economies.
00:16:05.800And the disasters of, say, North Korea with a beautiful control group, South Korea, same geography, same resources, same culture, same language, same history.
00:16:18.340What differentiates them is their political system.
00:16:20.960And South Korea is a much better place to live.
00:16:23.160It's not only freer, but it is also enormously more prosperous.
00:16:28.280Yes, well, I'm going to debate Slavoj Zizek on the 19th of April, and I've been preparing for that, you know, and I thought what I might do to begin with is list.
00:16:39.940There's a graph that I think humanprogress.org put out.
00:16:44.420It might be Matt Ridley's graph, or maybe Hans, is it Hans Rosling?
00:16:51.960Mariam Tupi is the proprietor of human progress.
00:16:54.340But it's what they call the most miraculous, most important graph in the world, which shows this unbelievable acceleration of human prosperity, basically kicking in exponentially around 1895.
00:17:07.700Yes, a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including a late historical economist named Angus Madison, who began the Madison Project,
00:17:17.740trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in eras where they did not collect those data at the time, but using historical data.
00:17:53.760I mean, there seems to be this proclivity towards the unequal distribution of phenomena, not just monetary phenomena.
00:18:02.540But I mean, if you look in virtually every domain of human endeavor that's associated with creativity, you get a Pareto distribution of productivity.
00:18:12.980You know, I mean, a small number of basketball players shoot the vast majority of the hoops, and a small number of record recording artists record the majority of the hits.
00:18:25.960A small number of planets have most of the mass, and like, there is this, I mean, I'm not trying to make a case that inequality isn't a problem.
00:18:36.160I'm trying to make a case that it's a way deeper problem than the Marxists presume.
00:18:40.500And then you have the other problem that, well, the poor keep getting richer.
00:18:44.440I mean, half the world is middle class now, and obesity is a bigger problem than starvation.
00:18:49.960I'm really having a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine.
00:18:57.700It's like, well, the problem you guys were identifying seems to not exist anymore.
00:19:03.420Yeah, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of Ayn Randian objectivism in which you have a pure, untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety net.
00:19:22.920Now, one of the discoveries that I made, which was almost as surprising as the hockey stick graph of prosperity,
00:19:30.820is the fact that in the 20th century, every developed country, every rich country, went on a spree of social spending.
00:19:38.560And so that from a baseline of about 1.5% of GDP redistributed to children and the poor and the elderly and the sick.
00:19:47.640Now, the median OECD country redistributes about 22% of its prosperity.
00:19:53.980And all rich countries are in a band from about 20% of GDP to about 30% of GDP.
00:20:02.400And actually, Canada, to my surprise, our home and native land is actually a bit lower than the United States.
00:20:08.460I still have people figure that out, even though Canada would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States.
00:20:14.320And in fact, the United States would be even higher if you added all of the socialism that is done through employers,
00:20:20.660like retirement and health insurance, which in other countries is done through the government.
00:20:24.960But even if we just looked at government redistribution, there just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety net.
00:20:47.560I mean the moderate left, because I believe that the dialogue between the moderate left and the moderate right is what keeps our ship stabilized, essentially.
00:21:14.700When we do that, we create hierarchies, and we do that in large part, we hope, by elevating those who are the most competent at solving the problems to the higher positions in the hierarchies.
00:21:27.380Now, that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that, poor measurement.
00:21:34.240But fundamentally, if your hierarchy is functional, the more competent people rise to the top.
00:21:40.800Now, that produces the advantage of solving the problem, but it produces the disadvantage of making a lot of people stack up at the bottom of that hierarchy, because that's what tends to happen, because of the Pareto distribution and the built-in proclivity for inequality.
00:22:00.640So the answer to that seems to be, well, we produce the hierarchies, we accept the inequality, but then we attend with some degree of clarity of vision and care to those who are dispossessed by the necessity of the hierarchies.
00:22:16.720And your claim seems to be, from what you just said, is that that's essentially what we've been doing in civilized democracies for the last hundred years, and that that seems to be roughly working.
00:22:31.200Now, whether or not the hierarchies are optimal in the sense that we're better off with a hierarchy, because of just what will happen in a distributed market economy, you may have winner-take-all situations where the most entertaining story, the most efficient car, the best washing machine in a global market will push out a lot of the competitors.
00:22:56.200And so you get that Pareto distribution.
00:22:58.640Whether or not anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society might even be beside the point.
00:23:05.220As long as you don't have central planning and distribution, it might naturally result if it is not explicitly opposed, which some of our policies do.
00:23:16.080As you mentioned, it's a little bit like environmental progress in that far from being in opposition to economic growth, it's often economic growth that lets people become more munificent, more generous.
00:23:32.940There are a number of reasons why every wealthy country has a social safety net and why, as countries get richer, like Brazil and India and China, they turn their attention to more social welfare.
00:23:46.660The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century, and the developing world is following suit.
00:23:55.540Partly, it's because some of the redistribution is investment.
00:24:54.360But what was so lovely about Montreal was that it was safe, it was beautiful, and it had an unbelievably vibrant public culture.
00:25:04.500And that was all a consequence of the fact that people, generally speaking, were well enough off.
00:25:12.780And so, you know, if you contrast that with a country like Brazil, where a tiny minority of people have all the wealth,
00:25:20.500well, they're stuck with the problem of living in gilded prisons.
00:25:23.820They have to move their children around in helicopters.
00:25:26.640And, like, I think one of the things that people realize as societies become richer is that it's better to calculate your wealth on a broader level,
00:25:38.460to include more people within the purview of what constitutes wealth for you.
00:25:43.040Because it's so nice to be in a city that's thriving and healthy and not crime-ridden and resentful.
00:25:53.020And those need to be factored in as elements of individual wealth.
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00:31:34.020I'm very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Steven Pinker from Harvard University.
00:31:41.080He's the John Stone family professor in the Department of Psychology there and has taught additionally at Stanford and MIT.
00:31:50.900He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations.
00:31:58.980Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard.
00:32:04.720He's won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style.
00:32:19.000He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy's world top 100 public intellectuals and Times' 100 most influential people in the world today.
00:32:39.700He's chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications.
00:32:50.940Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, was his 10th and best-selling book, published in February 2018.
00:33:01.620And it's very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again, and thanks very much for making the time.
00:33:09.280So, can I ask you, it's been about a year since we talked last, and I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all, personally, what's this year been like for you?
00:33:19.380You've become a much more controversial figure, I would say, than would really be predicted.
00:33:26.200Like, you've always seemed to me to be a solid, reliable, interesting, mainstream scientist, not someone who would attract a tremendous amount of critical attention, and yet you've become, well, oddly enough, associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be.
00:33:49.240And so much of what you're doing is controversial, and so what's that been like, and what's your life been like over the last while?
00:33:56.340Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defense of reason, science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary, and I'm hardly a flamethrower.
00:34:05.000And as you note, I have put forward some pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as that men and women aren't indistinguishable, that we all harbor some unsavory motives like revenge and dominance.
00:34:19.780But saying that the world has gotten better turns out to be a radical, inflammatory hypothesis.
00:34:28.260There's, first of all, just sheer incredulity, because the view of the world that you get from journalism is so different from the view of the world that you get from data, because journalism reports everything that goes wrong.
00:34:39.360It doesn't report things that go right, and so if there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it.
00:34:47.120On top of that, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the world has never been worse than it is now, and data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs, and so that does attract some opposition.
00:35:05.020People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular humanism, traditional liberalism.
00:35:13.840And so it does get some people exercised.
00:35:18.740Basically, anyone, if you're a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about the current society, then you're kind of committed to the idea that things have gotten worse.
00:35:31.780And the idea that things are not as bad as they used to be, not as bad as they could be, is an insult to that, those core beliefs.
00:35:40.760Yeah, well, it's a surprising thing, because, well, so let's talk about that a little bit.
00:35:46.840I mean, here's some of the things I know, I think I know, and maybe you could describe some of the things you know.
00:35:55.260And, like, I started learning that the world had been improving when I worked for a UN committee about five years ago now,
00:36:03.000and started looking at the data on ecology and sustainable economic development, and that's, like, there's some bad ecological news.
00:36:12.580I think that what we're doing to the oceans is fundamentally unforgivable and foolish beyond belief.
00:36:19.700But there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity.
00:36:25.640Like, there was a paper published in Nature not so long ago, stating, for example, that an area twice the size of the U.S. has greened in the last 15 years.
00:36:39.320That actually happened to be as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide, because plants can keep their pores closed if there's more carbon dioxide,
00:36:48.560and so they can live in more semi-arid areas.
00:36:52.040And there's more forests in the Northern Hemisphere than there were 100 years ago, and more forests in India and China than there were 30 years ago.
00:37:01.220And then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living.
00:37:07.380The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952, which is a statistic that I just regard as absolutely miraculous.
00:37:18.800The African economies are growing, sub-Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment, if the stats are reliable,
00:37:27.100than economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically
00:37:33.840and have access to reasonable information into something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives.
00:37:41.740The rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate, right?
00:37:50.880We have poverty considering it at $1.90 a day between 2000 and 2012, and I've read criticisms of that, saying, well, that was an arbitrary number.
00:38:01.300But if you look at $3.80 a day, you see the same decline.
00:38:07.800If you look at $7.60 a day, you see the same decline, not as precipitous.
00:38:12.060And even the UN, not known, I would say, for its optimistic prognostications, estimates that at this rate, by the year 2030,
00:38:22.160there won't be anyone in the world who's living below the current poverty level.
00:38:26.980So, there are some positive statistics.
00:38:30.780So, what would you like to add to that?
00:39:20.500We really can improve the world, if we set our minds to do it, should arouse so much anger, partly because people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better, that they confuse it with certain kinds of magical thinking, such as that this must mean that there is a force in the universe that carries us ever upward, that just makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality.
00:39:49.900The universe not only doesn't care about us, but has a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us, like entropy, like pathogens.
00:40:02.540Entropy is the root of all human suffering, ultimately.
00:40:07.580I've read two other things that are peculiar, that are so interesting.
00:40:13.340Well, okay, so first of all, it's pretty hard on the Marxists, I would say, because even though there is inequality, and inequality is a problem, first of all, it doesn't look like inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism.
00:40:29.300It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem than that, second, it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality, and third, and this is hard on the environmentalists, I think, is that it turns out that if you get people's income up to about $5,000 a year in terms of gross domestic product, they actually start to care about the environment, which I suppose is because they're not worried about dying instantly that day or that week.
00:40:59.280And so, we seem to be in this perverse situation for a pessimist, where we could make people wealthy and in a positive manner, and we could make the world a better place simultaneously, and that does seem to be very hard on ideologues whose ideology is predicated on a fundamental pessimism.
00:41:25.660Or you get the other people, like, the biologists do this sometimes, and say, well, yeah, we're purchasing all this short-term prosperity at, you know, for these billions of people, but at the cost of some medium to long-term eventual precipitous, you know, apocalyptic collapse, and it's very difficult to formulate an argument against that kind of idea, because, well, you never know when some...
00:41:50.880I think this is one of the things Taleb takes you to task for, doesn't he?
00:41:55.000Yes, even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of tail risks, both in the better angels of our nature and in enlightenment now.
00:42:05.780And indeed, we cannot take incremental improvement as itself an indication that the risk of catastrophes is at an acceptable level, and it may not.
00:42:17.600It's very hard to estimate what the risk of a catastrophe is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously.
00:42:24.460On the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resisted by people in the green movement, but if anything, it should give hope and sucker to the environmental movement,
00:42:36.840because it shows that it is not true that we have to choose between economic growth, which people do not want to give up, and protecting the environment, that we can have both.
00:42:47.120And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together.
00:42:50.000The nations that have done the most to clean up their environment in the last 10 years are the wealthiest nations, because they can afford it.
00:42:57.060If you're dirt poor, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head, and the fate of the white rhinoceros is going to be pretty low on your list of priorities.
00:43:08.000And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity.
00:43:11.400It's really awful to do without electricity, and I know having visited cities like Mumbai, which are horribly polluted, and they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity.
00:43:22.180But on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, then you're willing to spring for the cleaner energy, and you can afford the cleaner energy.
00:43:29.580And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy, and more long-term future concerns loom larger in your value system.
00:43:40.420So it's an odd assumption that both the hard right and the hard green have in common,
00:43:45.960which is that if we want to protect the environment, we have to sacrifice prosperity, go back to a simpler, more peasant style of life.
00:43:56.260The hard greens say, well, we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land.
00:44:04.020The hard right says, well, I don't want to do that.
00:44:06.960No one wants to do that, so to hell with the environment.
00:44:09.020The reality is that if both policy and technology are deployed intelligently, as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and foregoing all of the benefits of modernity.